Facebook’s founder is facing pressure to accept an invite from eight international parliaments, with lawmakers wanting to question him about negative impacts his social network is having on democratic processes globally. Last week Facebook declined a invitation from five of these parliaments. The elected representatives of Facebook users want Mark Zuckerberg to answer questions in

Cruise, the self-driving company acquired by GM in 2016, is expanding to Seattle as it seeks more engineering talent to develop its technology. The company doesn’t have any plans right now to test its autonomous vehicles in the city. Instead, GM Cruise plans to set up offices in Seattle to attract and hire between 100

Last year Amazon announced Comprehend, a natural language processing tool to help companies extract common words and phrases from a corpus of information. Today, a week ahead of its Re:invent customer conference, Amazon announced an enhancement to Comprehend that allows developers to build lists of specialized words and phrases without machine learning domain knowledge. “Today

Back in September, Microsoft announced a virtual desktop solution that lets customers run Office 365 and Windows 10 in the cloud. They mentioned several partners in the announcement who were working on solutions with them. One of those was FSLogix, a Georgia virtual desktop startup. Today, Microsoft announced it has acquired FSLogix. It did not

Good morning! Except if you’re a hosted Microsoft customer who’s locked out of your account right now. Microsoft’s cloud-based multi-factor authentication services went down across the globe early Monday morning, preventing access to users who are required to sign in using a second layer of authentication to their account, such as a text message, a

Five years and sixty potential locations later, NASA has chosen the Jezero Crater as the landing site for its Mars 2020 rover mission. Slated to launch in July the Mars 2020 rover mission will touch down at the Jezero Crater as NASA’s exploration of the Red Planet enters its next phase. The rover will be looking for

BuzzFeed News is giving readers a new way to support its journalism — by paying a monthly or yearly fee. BuzzFeed might not seem like the most obvious publication to ask readers for financial support, as it doesn’t really have the high-minded appeal of (say) NPR or the New Yorker. However, the company has been

In the next step on its path to getting its low earth orbit payload launch system up and running, Virgin Orbit successfully took its LauncherOne system out for a spin with an actual rocket attached under its wing. The company’s specially modified 747-400 carried a 70-foot-long rocket as part of a test flight proving that

Inboard, the startup that sells a range of electric scooters and skateboards, has just opened sales of its first premium scooter to the market just in time for the holiday season. The company has already sold 285 of the scooters in a private pre-sale with 80% of the orders coming from the United States and

Instagram is fighting back against automated apps people use to leave spammy comments or follow then unfollow others in hopes of growing their audience. Today Instagram is removing inauthentic follows, Likes, and comments that violate its policies from people’s accounts who use these apps; sending them a warning to change their password to cut ties

It seems like Netflix’s “House of Cards” had a real opportunity for a fresh start with season six. Granted, the behind-the-scenes turmoil probably made this season particularly challenging: Production was already underway when “Star Trek: Discovery” actor Anthony Rapp came forward with allegations that Kevin Spacey made a sexual advance towards him when Rapp was

VOI Technology, an e-scooter startup headquartered in Sweden but with pan-European ambitions, has raised $50 million in Series A funding, confirming our earlier scoop. As I previously reported, London-based venture capital firm Balderton Capital has led the round, alongside LocalGlobe, Raine Ventures, and previous VOI backer Vostok New Ventures. A number of angel investors also

It may sit in the shade of China and India, but tech has real growth potential in Southeast Asia. Home to a cumulative 650 million people, the region’s digital economy is forecast to triple in size and reach $240 billion over the next seven years, according to Google’s third “e-Conomy SEA” report. The annual study, which

Mozilla’s security-focused Firefox Monitor tool is expanding to be more proactive at notifying users about past data breaches, but one expert worries about the consequences. Mozilla began testing the initial integration between Firefox Monitor and Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) — a website that enables users to find out if their email addresses were in

Even in the best-case scenario, with effective network security infrastructure in place and an expert staff at the ready, network security can be a thorny task. Then, consider most organizations contend with serious resource limitations, and the picture becomes darker. As network security threats continue to evolve, here are some of the top network security

European online contact lens supplier Vision Direct has revealed a data breach which compromised full credit card details for a number of its customers, as well as personal information. Compromised data includes full name, billing address, email address, password, telephone number and payment card information, including card number, expiry date and CVV. It’s not yet

Two weeks from now, the Swahilipot Hub, a hackerspace / makerspace / center for techies and artists in Mombasa, Kenya, is hosting a Pwani Innovation Week, “to stimulate the innovation ecosystem in the Pwani Region.” Some of its organizers showed me around Mombasa’s cable landing site some years ago; they’re impressive people. The idea of

Diane Greene announced on Friday that she was stepping down after three years running Google’s cloud business. She will stay on until the first of the year to help her successor, Thomas Kurian in the transition. He left Oracle at the end of September after more than 20 years with the company, and is charged with making Google’s

William Hurley, commonly known as whurley, is an American entrepreneur and the founder of Chaotic Moon Studios, Honest Dollar, and Equals: The Global Partnership for Gender Equality in the Digital Age. He is currently chairing the Quantum Computing Working Group for the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA), and is the founder and chief executive of Strangeworks.

You may not have heard of ByteDance, but you probably know its red-hot video app TikTok, which gobbled up Musical.ly in August. The Beijing-based company also runs a popular news aggregator called Jinri Toutiao, which means “today’s headlines” in Chinese, and the app just assigned a new CEO. At a company event on Saturday, Chen Lin, an

Microsoft announced plans to shut down HockeyApp and replace it with Visual Studio App Center. The company acquired the startup behind HockeyApp back in 2014. And if you’re still using HockeyApp, the service will officially shut down on November 16, 2019. HockeyApp was a service that let you distribute beta versions of your app, get

Brooks Rainwater Contributor More posts by this contributor As tasks wane, skills rise Blockchain technology could be the great equalizer for American cities Scott Andes Contributor Scott Andes is the program director for the National League of Cities City Innovation Ecosystem program. The more than year-long dance between cities and Amazon for its second headquarters

A move to a new server OS is not a light undertaking, but do the Windows Server 2019 features pack enough punch to sway enterprises to make the switch to this release or Windows Server 2016? Microsoft released Windows Server 2019, the next installment in its Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), to general availability in October

US lawmakers have been warned of the growing risk to national and corporate security posed by Chinese efforts to dominate 5G infrastructure and the IoT supply chain. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s 2018 report to Congress claimed that significant state support for these technologies, along with alleged cyber-espionage, IP theft and other measures, have

In his opening keynote presentation kicking off the second day of this year’s Infosecurity North America conference in New York, the technical director of cybersecurity threat operations center for the NSA, Dave Hogue, talked about how innovations in policy, technology, and people can lead to break-through results in one of the largest 24-7-365 operational environments across the

It’s months past when the EU’s General Data Privacy Regulations (GDPR) went into effect, and many are wondering, “Where are we now?” Among the many aspects of the GDPR talked about at today’s Infosecurity North America conference, Nashira Layade, SVP, CISO at Realogy Holdings Corp., and Elena Elkina, partner at Aleada Consulting, spent a bit

Security researchers are urging parents to think twice about buying GPS-enabled smart watches to keep their children safe, after revealing that scores of models are riddled with vulnerabilities. Pen Test Partners’ initial research detailed security issues with the MiSafes device first launched three years ago. The idea, like all similar devices, is that it keeps

MPs are unhappy at the government’s response to their committee report on cybersecurity skills in critical infrastructure (CNI), claiming it fails to address the immediate challenges facing the industry. The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy published its initial report in July, claiming the skills gap in the sector was “cause for alarm” and that

A Japanese minister in charge of cybersecurity has shocked lawmakers after revealing that he doesn’t use a computer, and struggles to grasp the concept of a USB stick. Yoshitaka Sakurada, 68, is deputy chief of the government’s cybersecurity strategy office. However, responding to an independent lawmaker at a Lower House Cabinet Committee meeting this week, he’s